Cookbooks, Not Novels!

When you pick up the latest John Grisham or Carl Hiassen book, you start at the beginning and read through to the end.  In fact, some people lose sleep because they can’t stop turning the pages to find out what happens next!  Product manuals are not like novels—ordinarily no one reads them from beginning to end.  (And they probably don’t stay up late because they can’t bear to put them down, either!)

People don’t read cookbooks from start to finish, either.  If you want to find a recipe for chocolate cake, you don’t first read through pages of roast chicken and herbed carrots recipes—you turn right to the section on cakes.  Product manuals are like cookbooks: users open them up looking for specific information, and when they have found it, they don’t read further. 

For the manual writer, this means you can’t assume that your user has already read material from earlier in the manual.  You can always refer users to related procedures described elsewhere, but don’t expect them to look up safety information.  If critical safety warnings have been included in earlier sections, repeat them wherever they are needed.